Bezos may be world’s richest person, but Amazon isn’t fastest
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was recognized as the richest person in modern history, with a net worth of $150 billion, by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in July. That put him $55 billion ahead of the runner-up, Microsoft founder Bill Gates. It made him the richest man since records began — when Forbes launched its wealth ranking in 1982.
Online responses were mixed but largely critical, with one tweet by user @kweenrashi attracting more than 131,000 retweets: “He can literally fix Flints water issue 1800 times, end world hunger and still have 20 BILLION left over. The amount of wealth he is hoarding for no reason is disgusting.”
For me, the news rekindled the frustration of a “First World problem” I experienced over the summer with Amazon’s more than nickel-anddime approach to ecommerce.
For Father’s Day this year I turned to the West’s undisputed e-commerce leader, as I’m sure many expats did, finding themselves too far from home to deliver gifts in person. I bought my dad a pair of garden gloves suited for people with arthritis. I hoped they would protect him in the gardens of my cold and damp motherland — the United Kingdom.
I made the order five days in advance — plenty of time, I thought.
Yet to my shock and dismay, Amazon demanded another 5 pounds ($6.54) for the order to ship to my dad’s house in time.
There weren’t many other choices available, so I paid the fee.
The experience made me realize how spoiled I’ve become living in China. The irony was not lost on me that my First World problem is simply not a problem for consumers in China, which is still labeled a developing country.
And that’s not just the case for those with large virtual wallets, either.
The cutting-edge delivery services here will get pretty much anything to any door, often within 24 hours. Sick cat? E-commerce platform JD will deliver medicine by the next morning — that afternoon if you can find a local vendor. Realized mid-recipe you’ve forgotten to buy butter? RT Mart will deliver for free within the hour for orders over 30 yuan ($4.50). The Watsons’ app promises to deliver cosmetics or toiletries within two hours for those everyday emergencies.
According to an article on logistics news site FreightWaves, “more than 92 percent of products sold by JD are delivered within one day, including many that are delivered same day”. One of the key differences between JD and Amazon, it says, is that Amazon makes use of third-party logistics services for the troublesome last-mile delivery process, whereas JD took on that challenge itself from the start.
Even in rural areas, JD is experimenting with drone deliveries to village hubs to significantly shorten delivery times, according to FreightWaves, and it has more than 300,000 village promoters across the country.
A New York Times article has investigated JD’s pioneering role in rural areas, noting China’s e-commerce “growth will come disproportionately from third- and fourth-tier cities and from the country’s vast rural hinterland”.
But that’s just JD. A Technavio report puts the average delivery time for e-commerce packages in China at three days — not bad when there are 17 billion parcels zooming across the country every year.
There is hope on the horizon for the UK, though. Amazon is looking into high-tech answers to its last-mile delivery challenges, with the deployment of drones and crowdsourcing among potential solutions, according to a report from Business Insider. It already operates collection boxes across the country.
Also, JD has announced aspirations to enter the European e-commerce market, which could inject muchneeded competition into the industry.